Olaf Sakkers and the Fight to Break Through Venture Capital’s Emerging-Manager Squeeze
TL;DR
- Olaf Sakkers’ five-year route into venture capital reflects the steep fundraising and credibility hurdles facing first-time fund managers.
- Emerging managers are competing for scarcer institutional capital while LPs increasingly favor established firms, proven track records and larger funds.
- Sakkers’ experience shows how persistence, a focused investment thesis and early evidence of value creation can turn a difficult market into an opening.
The venture-capital industry has always marketed itself as a business built on conviction. In practice, however, conviction is often easier to find than capital.
That tension sits at the center of Olaf Sakkers’ five-year journey into venture capital. His path illustrates a challenge confronting a growing number of emerging managers: how to persuade investors to back a new fund when the manager has limited institutional history, markets are volatile and established firms are demanding a larger share of a shrinking pool of commitments.
For Sakkers, entering venture capital has required more than identifying promising startups. It has meant building trust with limited partners, developing a recognizable investment strategy, creating a network that generates differentiated opportunities and demonstrating that a first-time manager can operate with the discipline expected of a mature firm.
The result is a story about a market in transition—and about what it takes to build a venture platform when fundraising conditions are working against newcomers.
The emerging-manager squeeze
New venture firms face a particularly difficult environment. After years of abundant capital, rising startup valuations and aggressive fund formation, institutional investors have become more selective. Many limited partners are slowing the pace of new commitments, prioritizing existing relationships and concentrating capital with firms that have already returned money.
That shift has created what investors often describe as a “denominator effect.” Public-market losses and portfolio revaluations can leave institutions overexposed to private assets, even when they have not increased their private-market commitments. The result is less room for experimental allocations, including commitments to first-time funds.
At the same time, the venture industry has become more competitive. More former operators, angel investors and startup executives are attempting to raise funds, while established firms are expanding into earlier-stage investing. Emerging managers are therefore competing not only with other newcomers, but also with large platforms that possess brand recognition, extensive data and long-standing LP relationships.
The challenge is especially acute for managers whose track records were built through angel investing, syndicates or operating roles rather than through a conventional venture firm. They may have strong deal judgment, but converting that experience into an institutional track record requires time.
Why a personal track record is no longer enough
A first-time manager typically has to answer several questions at once.
Can the manager consistently source high-quality investments? Can they win competitive deals without a large firm’s reputation? Do founders trust them to provide useful support after the investment? Can they construct a portfolio rather than simply identify individual companies? And can they return capital at a scale that justifies an LP’s administrative and diligence costs?
These questions are difficult because venture returns are unevenly distributed. A small number of investments can determine the outcome of an entire fund, but those winners may take a decade or longer to mature. A manager raising a first institutional fund cannot easily point to realized distributions, especially during a period when exits remain constrained by weak initial-public-offering activity and a cautious acquisition market.
That creates a circular problem. Managers need capital to build a portfolio, but investors want evidence that the manager can build a portfolio before committing capital.
Sakkers’ route into venture
Sakkers’ experience reflects a broader shift in how new investors establish credibility. Rather than treating fundraising as a one-time event, emerging managers increasingly have to build their firms in stages.
That can include investing personal capital, forming syndicates, working closely with founders before a fund exists, publishing a clear view of the market and assembling a network of trusted co-investors. Each step creates a piece of evidence for prospective LPs.
The process is slower than launching a fund in a booming market, but it can produce a more durable foundation. A manager who has spent years developing relationships with founders and testing an investment thesis may enter institutional fundraising with something more valuable than a polished pitch deck: a demonstrated way of working.
For Sakkers, persistence has been central. Five years is a long time to remain committed to a career transition in an industry where access and reputation compound gradually. It also spans a dramatic change in venture conditions, from the capital-heavy years of the startup boom to a period defined by higher interest rates, down rounds, layoffs and more demanding investors.
That timing has made the journey harder, but it may also make the resulting investment platform more relevant to the current market.
A more disciplined venture landscape
The correction in venture capital has forced managers to rethink both investing and fundraising.
During the market’s expansion, startups could often raise large rounds on the basis of growth expectations. Investors competed to gain access, and funds raised quickly to maintain their position. Today, capital is more conditional. Startups are expected to show clearer paths to revenue, efficient use of capital and stronger governance. Venture firms, in turn, must demonstrate that they can help companies navigate a more demanding operating environment.
For emerging managers, this creates an opportunity to distinguish themselves. A small firm cannot usually compete with a multibillion-dollar platform on portfolio breadth or follow-on reserves. It can, however, compete on focus, speed and proximity to founders.
A manager with a narrow thesis may be better positioned to understand a technical market, identify emerging talent early or help a young company recruit its first employees. Smaller funds can also avoid the pressure to deploy enormous amounts of capital, allowing them to remain selective.
The trade-off is that a focused strategy must be credible. General statements about backing exceptional founders are rarely enough. LPs want to understand why a manager has a particular advantage, how that advantage produces proprietary access and whether the opportunity set is large enough to support a venture-scale portfolio.
Conviction as a fundraising tool
In a difficult fundraising market, conviction is not simply a personality trait. It is part of the product.
Emerging managers must make a case for why their strategy should exist, why it matters now and why they are specifically equipped to execute it. That argument can be based on sector expertise, geographic access, a founder community, technical knowledge or experience operating in a market that larger investors overlook.
Sakkers’ journey highlights the importance of maintaining that argument through changing conditions. A thesis that sounded attractive during the funding boom may need to be reframed when valuations fall and exit timelines lengthen. The strongest managers are not necessarily those who never change their views; they are the ones who can adapt their strategy without abandoning its underlying logic.
For LPs, that balance matters. A manager who changes direction with every market cycle may appear opportunistic. One who refuses to adjust may appear inflexible. The challenge is to demonstrate that the investment process is durable while the application of that process remains responsive to new realities.
The importance of founder trust
For a new venture firm, founder relationships can be more important than brand recognition.
Startups often select investors based on practical considerations: whether the investor understands the company’s market, can help recruit, can provide customer introductions, will support the company during difficult periods and will behave constructively in future financing rounds.
An emerging manager can be competitive if founders believe the investor will be accessible and useful. That relationship is built before the term sheet, but it is tested after the investment. Every portfolio company becomes part of the manager’s reputation among future founders and LPs.
This makes early portfolio construction especially consequential. A first-time fund cannot afford to treat support as a marketing slogan. The manager must decide where to spend limited time, how to help companies without becoming operationally intrusive and how to maintain relationships across a portfolio that may include very different businesses.
The fund-size dilemma
First-time managers also face a structural question: how much capital to raise.
A fund that is too small may not generate enough management fees to support a team or produce meaningful returns for institutional investors. A fund that is too large can force a manager to deploy capital outside the strategy that originally attracted LPs.
The decision affects portfolio construction, reserves and ownership targets. It also shapes the type of LP that can participate. Smaller family offices, foundations and specialist investors may be more willing to back a new manager, while larger institutions may require a longer record or a more established operational infrastructure.
Some emerging managers respond by starting with a smaller vehicle, an opportunity fund or a series of special-purpose investments. These structures can provide flexibility and help demonstrate investing ability, but they also introduce administrative complexity and may not create the same economics or portfolio diversification as a traditional fund.
The right answer depends on the strategy. What matters is whether the fund’s size, ownership model and reserve plan align with the manager’s stated edge.
Turning a difficult market into an opening
The current environment is unforgiving, but it is not uniformly negative for new firms.
Lower valuations can give disciplined investors access to companies at more reasonable prices. Founders may be more open to investors who offer genuine operating support rather than only capital. Established funds that are focused on protecting existing portfolios may have less capacity to pursue small, early-stage opportunities.
There is also a generational opportunity. New companies are being created around artificial intelligence, robotics, climate technology, healthcare infrastructure and other technical markets. Many of these businesses require investors who understand specialist talent pools and are willing to engage before conventional metrics are available.
An emerging manager does not need to win every category. The task is to identify a narrow area where relationships and judgment can produce an advantage, then remain consistent long enough for that advantage to become visible.
What Sakkers’ story says about venture capital
Sakkers’ five-year effort is a reminder that venture capital is often presented as a sector of sudden insight, while the actual business is built through repeated, less visible work.
Fundraising meetings, founder conversations, market research and early investments rarely generate immediate headlines. Yet those activities determine whether a manager can build an institution rather than simply participate in individual deals.
The experience also exposes a contradiction in venture capital. The industry depends on finding new companies before they become obvious, but its own capital allocation process often favors managers who are already well known. Emerging managers must therefore persuade LPs to apply the same early-stage logic to the fund manager that venture investors apply to startups.
That does not mean every new fund deserves backing. Institutional discipline remains essential. But a market that allocates capital only to established firms risks narrowing the range of ideas, geographies and founder communities that receive sustained support.
The next test
For Sakkers and other emerging managers, raising capital is only the first test. The harder task is converting a thesis into a portfolio, supporting companies through a longer holding period and producing returns in a market where exits may remain selective.
The next generation of venture firms will likely be judged on more than the size of their funds. LPs will scrutinize reserve strategies, ownership levels, portfolio concentration, operating costs and the quality of follow-on decisions. Founders will judge firms by their behavior during missed targets, difficult financings and leadership changes.
That environment rewards managers who are patient, specific and operationally credible.
Sakkers’ path into venture capital shows why breaking through the emerging-manager squeeze requires more than optimism about startups. It requires a willingness to build trust over years, operate with limited resources and defend a point of view when the market no longer rewards easy narratives.
In a sector built around the future, that may be the most important form of conviction: continuing to build before the results are obvious.
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